9

MAX felt numb as Bitsy’s car wound its way through the London streets. “Maybe it’s a sign,” he said.

“That it’s eighty days?” Alex said gently, turning around. “I thought you believed in facts, Max. Not omens.”

Max nodded. “Yeah.”

“I mean, if we had a lead, somewhere to start, a reason to keep looking, we could stay,” Alex pointed out. “But . . .”

Her voice trailed off, and Max looked through the car window. They passed a shabby older man sitting on a park bench. He was feeding a flock of pigeons with crumbs from a thick plastic bag marked ST. DUNSTAN HOUSE OF WELCOME. For a moment Max thought it might be the old guy with the droopy eye, Nigel. But the clothes were much more threadbare, the face thinner and more rugged.

The thought of Nigel reminded him of the strange note. He fished it out and gave it another look.

“That thing again?” Alex said, looking over her shoulder. “Max, it’s just silliness.”

“If it’s a code, I want to solve it,” Max said. “I thought you liked codes.”

“You just had some sad news,” Bitsy reminded Alex. “This could take your mind off it.”

“Yeah, guess so.” Alex sighed and unbuckled her belt. She swung her leg into the space between the front seats, and then squeezed into the back next to Max and glanced at the message for a few moments. “Well, there’s an apostrophe followed by an R. Lots of words end in apostrophe-s, like ‘That’s cool.’ So maybe we should substitute S for R.”

Max nodded. “S is one letter after R in the alphabet. That’s got to be it. We substitute the next letter over, for all of them!”

“So how would you solve Z?” Alex asked.

“There is no Z in the message,” Max said. “But if there was, it would become an A. You’d go to the beginning.”

He carefully wrote out the top line with all the substituted letters:

GJSTZN’S LVST LVUPS

“That’s even worse,” Alex groaned.

“You know, words end in apostrophe-t also,” Bitsy piped up, “like ‘I can’t stand asparagus.’ Also apostrophe-d—‘Where’d you get that coat?’”

“OK . . . if apostrophe-R becomes apostrophe-T, that’s two letters over,” Max said, counting in his head, “and if it becomes apostrophe-D, that’s . . . fourteen letters back.”

He tried it both ways:

go over 2 letters for each —

HKTUAO’T MWTU MWVQT

go back 14 letters for each —

RUDEKY’D WGDE WGFAD

“Like I thought,” Alex said. “The guy is a nut job.”

But Max was staring at the rest of the message. “There’s stuff below the letters. It says ‘V minus 2 (why yes),’ then ‘C plus 1.’”

“Plus and minus . . .” Alex said. “That sounds like what we’ve just been doing. But it turned out wrong.”

“So maybe you substitute only the Vs and Cs?” Bitsy guessed. “Backward two with each V and forward one with each C?”

“Look at that top line,” Max said. “It has no V or C in it. I’m thinking V and C might stand for something.”

“‘Very’ and ‘Crazy,’” Alex replied.

“Or something to do with words?” Bitsy said. “V could mean ‘Verb.’ And C . . . um . . .”

“‘Cadjectives?’” Alex said.

Max shook his head. “Or letters. V could be ‘Vowels,’ C ‘Consonants.’”

“So . . . V minus two would mean ‘go two vowels back in the alphabet,’” Alex said.

“It says ‘why yes’!” Max blurted. “That’s another clue. Get it?”

“Actually, no.”

“It’s not ‘why’—it’s the letter Y!” Max said. “Y can be considered a vowel or a consonant. So why, yes means ‘yes, Y is a vowel’!”

“Brilliant!” Bitsy exclaimed, braking hard for a red light.

“We need to stay alive for this,” Alex said.

“OK, so V minus two . . . take each vowel and go two vowels to the left,” Max said softly. “And we have AEIOUY to work with. So, like, O would be E . . .”

“And C plus one means for each consonant we go forward one,” Alex said. “Ucchhh! I think we need to write out a substitution key.”

She quickly wrote out what each letter would be:

vowels:

a e i o u y =

u y a e i o

consonants:

b c d f g h j k l m n p q r s t v w x z =

c d f g h j k l m n p q r s t v w x z b

Carefully Max substituted each letter in Nigel’s note:

FIRSYM’R KURS KUTOR

GASTON’S LIST LIVES

Alex let out a scream.

Bitsy slammed on the brakes, nearly colliding with a parked car. “Good God, what is it?”

Max could barely sit. He was bouncing on the seat. “The list—the one they burned—it exists!”

“Really?” Bitsy turned. “We have to find that fellow then—Nigel.”

“No,” Max said, a thought churning up in his head. “Not yet. We have to get back to the Reform Club.”

“What?” Alex said.

“Just drive!” Max commanded. “Now!”

Bitsy’s car squealed to a stop in front of the club, causing a poodle on a leash to nearly leap a foot in the air.

“Sorry,” Max said as he pushed open the car door.

He ran to the trash can and reached in, as the poodle sped off down the block with its owner close behind.

“Dear boy, will you explain yourself?” Bitsy asked.

Max pulled out a fistful of papers, orange rinds, and candy wrappers. Shaking loose the debris, he held up a wilted, stained napkin. “The note Queasly gave us.”

“Ew, Max,” Alex said. “Just ew.”

“Think about the facts,” Max said, pacing. “Fact: this guy Nigel knew we were going to be at the funeral. He’s related to us—well, OK, we don’t know if that’s a fact. Anyway, somehow he has this information about Gaston’s book—”

“So maybe Gaston is his ancestor,” Alex said, “the way Jules Verne is ours!”

Max nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking. So fact: he gives us the note, but we don’t know what it means. Another fact: we go to the actual place where Jules Verne made the deal to produce two books, his novel and Gaston’s nonfiction book about the secret, real cure. To keep that book secure, the two Vernes keep it away from the club but tease them with a list—which has info about the ingredients for this formula. Fact: because no one can read it, the club guys get angry and throw it into their files—and years later, old Queasly burns it. But wait—the note from Nigel says the list still exists. Which means someone rescued it . . .” Max grinned. “And there’s only one person that someone could be.”

If Max had had popcorn, Alex’s and Bitsy’s open mouths would have been perfect targets.

“Queasly . . .” Bitsy said.

“Right,” Alex said. “He knew we were curious about Verne. He saw us go to the basement with Wooster. And he saw us coming back up all disappointed. So he must have figured that Wooster told us about the incineration.”

“And he got all agitated,” Bitsy said. “But not because I was so incredibly beautiful. Because he had something to tell us!”

“Bingo,” Max said, holding up the napkin. “So he wrote this note.”

“Bingo,” Bitsy said with a nod.

“That’s Alex’s word,” Max said. “Meaning ‘voilà.’”

They gathered around to look at the note.

“Everything you said makes sense,” Bitsy said. “But I don’t understand what this mess could possibly mean.”

“It’s got to mean something,” Max said. “Maybe . . . ‘the Gaston manuscript is hidden inside a scarecrow’?”

“He’s old,” Alex said. “Like, old old. You saw the way his hands shook. Maybe this isn’t a drawing. Maybe he was trying to write something . . . .”

She turned the napkin sideways and then upside down.

“Wait,” Max said. “That looks like letters and numbers.”

“He needs to take handwriting lessons from Uncle Nigel,” Bitsy said.

“I’m thinking that top line is a word,” Max offered. “The swoop looked like a C, then an L . . . A . . .”

“Looks like an X tucked underneath, then an O . . . N . . .” Alex said.

“Claxon?” Bitsy piped up. “That’s the name of a street.”

“And those squiggles underneath it,” Alex said. “They look like numbers—two, three, nine, seven. And a group in the middle—three, six, one.”

“And then way at the bottom, two, four, zero, one, three,” Max added.

Alex smiled. “He signed it at the bottom, with the letter Q. That’s cute.”

“I’m no Sherlock Holmes, but I would say the address is either 361 or 2397 or 24013 Claxon . . .” Bitsy said, shaking her head. “But no one in the Reform Club would be caught dead in the neighborhood of Claxon Street. Mummy would kill me if she knew I even thought of going there.”

But Max was already checking his GPS. “The address 2397 Claxon is the only one that exists, and it’s a little over a mile away,” he said. “I can walk.”

Bitsy grabbed his arm. “I will not be responsible for your early demise. Let me text Mummy we’ll be late.”

As she took out her phone, Alex ran to the car and slipped into the front passenger seat. That meant Max had to ride in back, but this time he didn’t mind. “Woo-hoo!” he screamed, punching his fist into the air.

“Mummy, it’s very important,” Bitsy was saying softly into the phone. “I know you prefer voice to text, so I thought I’d . . . yes, it has to do with an important matter . . . I will tell you later . . . I think you will be pleased . . .”

Max stuck the napkin into his pocket. But as he ran around the back of the Volvo, he stopped short.

The sun, struggling to appear among the clouds, cast a weak beam of light against an ornament on the trunk of the car. Its gold-and-black logo glinted dully at him.

It was a sleekly designed NE.

Niemand Enterprises.